


Renaissance

by iimpavid



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Drinking, Ex-Boyfriends, Gen, M/M, Monologue, POV Third Person Limited, Rebirth, Roommates, Slice of Life, Vampires, YouTube, vlogging - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-28 03:07:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18202682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: He is struck silent by his own hands.





	Renaissance

**Author's Note:**

> Just some scenes that got stuck in my head and wouldn't leave, as usual, and so this is unbeta'd. I hope you get some amusement out of it.
> 
>  
> 
> To any legal types who might be curious: I don't own this, it ain't canon, I'm not making money writing fanfic, "death of the author" is a Real Thing goddamn it, I would appreciate not being sued, etc., etc.

The earth was dark and deep and blessedly cool. Burrowed deep in soft soil, soil that was rich with the decay of thousands of bodies, a vampire might sleep undisturbed for a millennium.

What a shame then that, shy of a mere 300 years, Nicki woke up screaming.

The fire had eaten his clothes, his skin, nearly all of him— but it left his bones. The pyre wasn’t hot enough, couldn’t have been hot enough to reduce him to ash and so he persisted. The screaming that rang through his head wasn’t his— he could feel himself making sound but the clangor crowding his ears was too much to parse. Black earth dripped from his hair, streaked across his new skin, caked into hands that clawed him up out of the ground and dragged broken nails down his face.

He is struck silent by his own hands.

That little monster had held them last.

That little auburn-haired beast.

_Armand the beautiful_.

Armand had chopped them off to stop his playing before he wore his violin to dust-- but here they were now. His hands persisted at the ends of his wrists. Ringed with scars like perforations tucked against his protruding wrist bones. Patches a shade too pale stitched onto the sleeves of a worn coat.

He killed the first person to stumble across him. Heaving naked in freshly broken soil he was no reasonable figure. He had crawled his way out of his grave. He could nearly be convinced the groundskeeper deserved to die.

Paris was day-bright despite the sickle moon. He slunk beneath its buzzing chemical lights fully aware of how caught out of time he was. Humans, at least, were still recognizably human despite being so clean and shrouded with leaping currents and endless sound.

The second murder was more out of necessity than thirst although his aching body still thanked him for the nourishment. The groundskeeper’s flannel shirt and trousers were too big twice over. The opium-stinking young man several miles west of the square that had swallowed the cemetery Nicki died in was not as clean as he perhaps should have been-- but now Nicki had clothes that fit him and the softness of the addict’s heady blood muted the screaming that seemed to assail him from every corner of the world.

The cacophony might have overwhelmed him if it had not been so familiar. So intimately dear to his heart. He had learned to make peace with it long before Lestat had bent him into a monster; the only thing for the chaos was, had ever been, the violin.

__

The violin was in the collection of a dead woman who didn’t have the decency to succumb to the inevitable. Nicki might have admired her for that but she kept his violin under glass. It hadn’t been played in nearly a hundred years-- time had relegated it to the role of a collectors’ piece, a relic, and not a living thing that required touch to live. And on top of that, she had the audacity to pull a gun on him. It was a small, ugly weapon that had little in common with the pistols he was accustomed to but for its general shape.

He glanced between her and the IV pole that she leaned too heavily upon. Wealth could only buy so much when cancer came to call. “You’re a dead woman,” he told her, “what use do you have for stolen goods?”

“It’s mine! I inherited it from my grandfather. You can’t just-- break in here and-- and steal it!”

“Your grandfather was a thief or else the sort of bottom feeder to associate with thieves and the sons of thieves! I don’t care how he came by it! _This violin is_ _mine and I’m taking it back._ ” He tapped a nail on the tempered glass. It shattered neatly in its frame. A second tap and the glass tumbled shimmering to the floor.

Out of mercy or distraction, he left her alive.

__

The video began, an unsteady camera in the hands of a pasty young man walking down a busy street. He was lit from one side by a bank of white fluorescents and from the other the yellowish glow of street lamps. The cast it gave his skin was nothing less than nauseating. But delight was writ into every line of his expression and when he talked every muscle in his face was too clean in its movements. “Hey guys, it’s Nicki. I’m... not much for vlogging but I have to show you _this_.”

His mouth worked around a tight smile; he was trying not to laugh. The image changed to the phone’s front camera and a bookstore display came into focus. A handwritten sign proclaimed in French, “ _used books €.50 each!_ ”  Slowly the frame zoomed in on the cover of a book near the back of the display. Its dust jacket was long gone but the white buckram glued to the pasteboard of the cover was embossed in gold:

_The Vampire Lestat_.

Nicki chuckled low in his chest. “I need to read this.”  

The camera shook and swung wildly for a few moments while he turned up the street. He went into the store and paged through the book, snickering to himself.

“ _Is this even real_ ,” he whispered, delighted and a little shrill.

He was careful to film the signature on the endpaper from the book’s presumed author: _Lestat de Lioncourt_. The black ink was all heavy flourishes taking up most of the page because the man had never in life or death heard of subtlety. Nicki knew that signature anywhere. After all, he’d taught the hand that drew it.

“This is _so like him_.”

He paid for the book giggling all the while.

The video cut to a silent, fast-forward sequence in his living room. Nicki sat on his roommate’s overstuffed white sofa. If the clock in the background was to be believed, he tore through the book in less than an hour (literally in some places, leaves pulling loose from their glue or pages torn in two by his too-hasty fingers).

He stared at the back cover for a full minute when he was done.

Then, he burst into hysterics.

It might have been called laughter, the shrieking cackle that surged out of him with such force he couldn’t keep himself upright. He tried to collapse back into the sofa but crashed to the floor instead, his limbs disobedient, his lungs gasping for breath.

From a distance there came a furious shout, “ _Nicki! Shut the fuck up!_ ”

Nicki managed to clap both his hands over his mouth-- with speed and force that might have broken a person’s teeth. He laid on his back, breathing heavy through his nose, uncontrollably laughing. Tears streamed a soft pink stain from the corners of his eyes back into his hair. Every so often his torso would writhe and his head or shoulders would bang against the hard wooden floor.

The sound of a door wrenching open. His roommate came stomping into the living room, the top of her shoulder and right ear in the frame. “ _What is wrong with you? Be quiet! Some of us get up in the morning like actual humans!_ ”

With visible, painful effort, Nicki pried his hands away from his mouth and hissed, “ _Light of my life, forgive me, it won’t happen again_ ,” and clapped them back down to stifle the next gale that threatened to wake the whole neighborhood.

Muttering French profanities Marisol retreated back to her room.

Sprawled on the floor, Nicki was done laughing for the moment. He didn’t take his hands from his mouth, though, until his breathing returned to normal. Better safe than sorry.

He crawled to the camera’s tripod, already starting to chuckle again without realizing it. His hair was damp, just a little at the roots, with bloody sweat and threatening to curl. As he took the camera from its perch to record his outro it focused on his mouth, too-red lips and tongue sliding against pristine teeth.

“My name’s Nicki.” He bit his lip, tried to contain his mirth. “This’s been… I guess you might call it fun. I’ll talk to you again soon.”

__

Nicki’s Youtube channel was a modest endeavor, something to help his roommate keep the lights on. Because _unlike some people_ his entire family had been killed off during the Revolution and thus guaranteed that he had to work for a living. Nicki just happened to be lucky enough to be pretty enough (and willing to steal and murder enough) to make a living doing something that didn’t require him to leave Marisol’s house.

Marisol Ortiz was infinitely better at functioning in society than her deadbeat flatmate. An accountant could be nothing less. A fact that Nicki never once took for granted and that guaranteed Marisol, unbeknownst to her, a life of safety and mysteriously-kidnapped harassers. She dealt with the disgusting realities of paying the bills and Nicki gave her as much of his income as he could stand to be parted with-- which was, in effect, most of it.

After all, if he ever wanted to earn more, the only thing he would have to do is pick up his violin.

__

“I suppose this explains why my channel is so popular among goths of a certain age,” Nicki mused to no one in particular. It was satisfying to know that, despite Marisol having gone out dancing hours ago, he had a camera to keep him company.

Over the last week, he’d been in and out of the little used book shop again and again. The so-called _Vampire Chronicles_ and their spinoffs were scattered haphazardly across the glass top of the coffee table. He’d read them to death. Some freshly-battered copies were now held together by rubber bands. Compiled under pseudonyms and full of tales spanning millennia they were, he’d learned, remarkably well-known. There were movies, too. Terrible, addictive movies. The publisher who had had the good luck to pick up poor Daniel Molloy’s transcription of that fateful conversation with Louis de Pointe du Lac was surely worth millions.

Nicki sipped from the matte black mug in his hand, his eyes distant and distracted. A little fluid clung, bright red, to the Cupid’s bow of his upper lip-- he licked it away with measured slowness.

“Apparently Lestat’s gone and made it so he can’t be killed. Not by any reasonable effort, anyway, which ruins my plans for the future. A shame, that. Really, what’s the point of being functionally immortal if you’re not going to hold grudges for eternity?”

He pointed to his copy of _The Queen of the Damned_ ; half its cover was missing. “According to _that_ , I should probably be dead. If this _Akasha_ character really killed all of us “vampires” except the ones he loved. If Lestat remembered me at all in the ‘80’s it can’t’ve been with love. I don’t know that he ever loved me. He _needed_ me, certainly.”

A species of rage at the thought contorted his features, mouth pulling back like putty while his eyes burned. “He always _needs someone_ . To argue with. To leech a purpose from. To push away and drag along, back and forth and back _and forth and back and forth_ ! --he pitied me, too. I know it. You all know it, obviously, you read the book before I did. _Oh, my poor, dear Nicki who never chose any of this, mired in existential crisis for absolutely no rational reason at all, living in terror of a malevolent God-- that poor fool has clung so hard to his faith it’s killing him_ ! _Whatever can we do? Oh, I know, I’ll fuck off to Egypt with my mother to explore my Oedipus Complex and let Nicki get maimed by a cult!_ Damn him!”

The mug in his hand exploded. Blood spattered the table, his face, the white sofa. A droplet flew onto the camera lens. Shards of ceramic ground to dust and dripped onto the pooling mess on the floor.

Flat, drained of all vitality, Nicki stared at his own hand in disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me--”

A jump cut to: Nicki knelt on the floor, wearing floral dish gloves with a bucket of hot water at his side. He dabbed peroxide into the blood smeared onto the sofa. He scrubbed furiously at the wood floor until the varnish itself wore away. The blood wasn’t his problem.

Another cut. Nicki sat on the floor, elbows propped on his splayed knees, dish gloves dangling from one hand. “You know, before I found that book I was pretty content doing product reviews and looking pretty for all of you and now look what’s become of me."

He flung the gloves offscreen. "Lestat has this effect. On everyone. Everything he touches falls apart into entropy and _he likes it this way_. All of you in the comments who are-- I know, I can hear you doing it now from the past like an oncoming storm-- mooning over him and swarming to a defense he doesn’t know or care about. You need to understand that.”

He exhaled through his nose, just once, heavy, and shook his head. “This’s gonna be great for my subscriber count, though.”

**Author's Note:**

> Listen to me. 
> 
> Listen very closely. 
> 
> Your comments are the vital fluid which sustains me. 
> 
> Give me life. 
> 
> Comment.


End file.
